


The Best Way to Make Sugar Cookies

by MayContainBlueberries



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Baking, Christmas Fluff, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-09 02:21:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5521904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MayContainBlueberries/pseuds/MayContainBlueberries
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mako has an important role for Christmas Dinner.<br/>Featuring copious amounts of sugar, culinary engineering, and disturbingly blue icing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Best Way to Make Sugar Cookies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [boredbyreality](https://archiveofourown.org/users/boredbyreality/gifts).



> This is not so much Christmas dinner as it is Christmas dessert, so I hope you will forgive me for that.

“I need help.” Mako, 13 but looking much smaller, stood in the door of the lab.

Hermann looked up from his computer, “Of course,” he said. “With what?”

“I need to make sugar cookies,” Mako replied.

That was not what Hermann had been expecting, but he simply blinked and nodded slowly.

Newton bounced over from his side of the lab, “Did someone say cookies? Dude, I am the cookie _master_!”

Hermann snorted, “I would not trust you within five meters of an oven.”

Newton whirled to face him, “Well I bet your cookies would taste like chalk dust and crushed dreams.”

Hermann simply sniffed.

Mako was looking back and forth between the two of them.

Newton blistered, “Dude I would totally best you in a baking showdown.”

“That’s highly unlikely,” Hermann said.

“No, this is happening. Bake off. Right now.”

Hermann raised his eyebrows, “Mako, if you’d like to make cookies that would be palatable, I would suggest excluding Newton from your baking endeavours.”

Mako shook her head slowly. “I think,” she said diplomatically, “I’d best see both of your methods.”

 

 “I have a recipe,” Mako said. “And I got all the ingredients.”

She hefted a bag up onto the counter. They were in a large industrial kitchen, all stained stainless steel and flickering fluorescent bulbs.

Hermann glanced at the recipe, then at Mako’s bag.

“Where did you get all this?” he asked.

“Tendo got it for me,” she replied happily.

Fair enough, Hermann thought.

“Well,” Hermann said, “we mix the wet and dry ingredients separately. Can I trust you to mix the dry ingredients?”

“Sure!” Mako said, grabbing the bag of flour and the carton of sugar.

“Wait,” Hermann said, holding out a hand, “sugar goes with the wet ingredients.”

“But sugar isn’t wet that makes no sense,” Mako argued, forehead wrinkling.

“It has to do with the chemistry,” Hermann explained. “The sugar is miscible – dissolves really well, that is – in the butter so we combine those first to get a new solution.”

Mako still looked skeptical. “Okay…” she said

Hermann frowned at the recipe, “Tendo didn’t happen to give you an electric mixer as well, did he?”

“Nooo,” Mako said. “Why?”

“Well, while it is possible to beat the butter and sugar to their desired consistency by hand, it takes quite a bit of time, not to mention upper body strength.”

“I’m strong!” Mako said, flexing her muscles.

Hermann chuckled. “That you are,” he said. “Get started mixing the dry ingredients with those strong arms. I’ll be back shortly”

When Hermann got back Mako had mixed the flour, baking powder and salt together, set them off to the side, and measured out the proper portions of butter and sugar into another bowl.

Hermann held up a contraption to show her. It was definitely some kind of mechanism, gears meshed together and two forks poking out the end. It was held together using a considerable amount of duct tape.  

“Hope this works,” he told Mako.

He flipped a switch on the back of the device. It roared to life, motor spinning two forks in rapid pirouettes. Hermann gingerly eased it into the unmixed sugar and butter. Sugar leapt out of the bowl, settling gently over the kitchen and over Mako and Hermann.

Hermann turned off the makeshift mixer.

“I guess we’ll have to mix it by hand after all,” he said.

He was about a minute into beating the butter and sugar into resembling something vaguely homogeneous, when Mako tapped his shoulder.

“I think I fixed it,” she said, holding up the mixer.

Hermann looked it over, frowning at the rearranged gear train, and the different angle of the forks.

Mako smiled expectantly at him.

It can’t hurt, Hermann thought, sticking the forks into the bowl and flipping the mixer back on.

It worked like a dream. Soon the eggs and vanilla (honest to god real vanilla extract, to Hermann’s amazement) were added, and Hermann slowly poured the dry ingredients into the bowl while Mako stirred.

“That looks about right,” Hermann said.

Mako looked at him sideways, “But we should check right?” she said.

Hermann grinned at her, “I suppose we should.”

They both scooped up fingerfulls of batter.

“It tastes about right too,” Mako said, licking the last bit of batter off her finger. “Do we bake it now?”

“Not quite yet,” Hermann replied, pointing to the next-to-last step in the recipe. “First we let it chill for a couple hours. That will make it easier to cut out shapes.”

They made four balls of dough, wrapped them in wax paper, and stowed them in the large industrial fridge.

“What now?” Mako asked.

Hermann sighed, “I suppose you and Newton could mix up your cookie batter.”

 

“The first step to baking awesome cookies,” Newt said to a shy Mako, “is using more sugar than they tell you to.”

Mako nodded. She was more comfortable with Hermann; Newt had an energy and intensity that was a little harder to relax around.

“Hey,” Newt said, “we are going _own_ this baking war. Well, I am. You’re on both teams which doesn’t really seem fair. I’ll forgive you because you’re young and unlearnéd in the ways of baking prowess.”

Mako giggled.

“That’s the spirit!” Newt said. “You need to stay positive in the kitchen. The baking can smell your fear. It’ll attack.”

Mako giggled again, and pulled out the two bowls that she and Hermann had used.

“Woah,” Newt said. “We need fifty percent less bowl for this project.”

“But it says to do the wet and dry ingredients separately,” Mako argued.

Newt waved a hand, “Pshhhaw, they just say that to keep you from living your life. It doesn’t matter what order you put the ingredients in.”

“How does putting ingredients in in a certain order stop me from living my life?” Mako asked.

But newt was already pouring the flour over a block of butter.

“I have an electric mixer,” Mako said when all the ingredients were in a bowl.

“You do?” Newt asked.

“Well I guess it’s really Hermann’s,” Mako said.

Newt wrinkled his nose, “That feels like cheating.”

“Well, I kind of helped make it,” Mako said, “and since I’m on your team…”

They used the electric mixer.

The dough was looking a lot lumpier than when Mako had made it with Hermann, and there were chunks of butter that weren’t combined fully into the butter. Newt didn’t seem to mind.

“Now we make it into shapes,” he said. “I suggest we do a series of Jaeger and a series of Kaiju and they can have cookie fights.”

“Shouldn’t we let it chill first?” Mako said, showing Newt the recipe.

Newt shorted, “Please. The quicker we get to the eating stage of this the better.”

Mako looked askance at Newt, “We’ve been eating batter this whole time.”

Newt paused, “You make some compelling points.”

 

Christmas dinner had been finished and the few people who were still hanging around the shatterdome for the holiday were sitting contentedly around a single long table.

Mako nudged Stacker. He cleared his throat, “I believe Mako has a special dessert for us.”

Mako grinned and jumped up, running out of the room, and coming back in carrying two plates of cookies. The ones on the right plate were neatly cut into shapes of snowflakes, Christmas trees and stars. They were a uniform golden hue, and sprinkled with icing sugar. The ones on the left more-so resembled abstract art pieces. They were lumpy and uneven, and some looked to be decorated with what Hermann fervently hoped was icing in a shade of toxic-looking electric blue.

Mako gamely alternated between one plate and the other, but by the time the evening drew to a close, Hermann was pleased to see that the cookies on _his_ plate were all gone.

The next morning, Newton woke up and found a cookie in the shape of a stocking, and in precise cursive done with blue icing, the words ‘I win’.

**Author's Note:**

> Newt and I have the same method of baking and I do not recommend it 'cause it ends in weirdly shaped cookies with random pockets of flour.  
> What are timelines? What is, like, any of the extended canon of Pacific Rim? I really do not know.


End file.
